Humanshoe theory

Everything is different than me

Imagine you are at the top of a lush green mountain, enshrouded in light mist, but high enough to clearly see the landscape below. Your view is open in every direction. You can see, to your left, a mighty river with an imposing city arising in the distance. Turn to the right, and small villages dot some hills. To their right, a dense forest, with a flock of white birds soaring overhead. Now turn your body ninety degrees further to the right, and there is an entirely different scene. You can watch one, two, three, four small fishing boats move slowly across a peaceful lake. There’s a monkey rustling in a tree much closer to you. Behind you, in the distance, is an ancient temple ensconced in banana trees. The scenery is so rich and varied that you could spend hours just looking around. The are wonders “as far as the eye can see.”

Because it is true that the eye can only see so far. Hundreds of miles away on the horizon, no matter which way you look, you see the same thing. At the very limit of what you can perceive, you simply see a single line — separating the land from the sky. What you see as a line might really be a desert, or a shopping mall, or the scene of a horrific battle. Across 360° it must contain as much beauty and suffering and diversity as the world in front of you. You see a line. The further something is from a human being, the harder it is to see, and in extremis, everything looks the same.

Now imagine you are staring at your own two feet. You carefully study your shoes. You focus on them intensely, for an hour, then a day, then a month. You do this for decades, without interruption. Two things will happen. You will become wonderfully knowledgeable about every small difference between your left and right shoe, and every single way that both have changed throughout the years. And secondly, your eyes will adjust. Everything outside of the main attraction — your human shoes — will become blurry, appearing as nothing more as than an undifferentiated mass the color of concrete. Should something happen to enter your narrow field of vision, it will simply appear as a ripple in the uninteresting world outside of your shoes. A ladybug? Not shoe. A leaf? Not shoe. A piece of trash? Not shoe. Raindrops? Not shoe!

My contention here is that people who fall for the seductive allure of “horseshoe theory” are engaged in the second activity. Horseshoe theory is the conceptualization of the world carried out by people obsessed with themselves. Because, obviously, everything in the world is not you. If you look around for the ways that things are not you, it is fantastically easy to place everything into a single category. Allow me to unveil humanshoe theory: if you spend your life staring at your own two feet, then everything else will look the same.

To review: “horseshoe theory” is the idea that the further you get from the center of the political spectrum (left ↔ right) the two extremes start to converge. You might have heard some version of it that goes, like “if you go far enough to the left, you come out on the other side.” Or: “the far left and far right have more in common than there are differences between them.” But the apparent similarity is usually a shared deviation from the beliefs of the speaker; this is obviously a question of perspective.

For example: in 2016 it was correct to say that “both the radical left and the far right do not support Hillary Clinton for President of the United States.” If you worked in the Clinton campaign, this difference is going to matter a whole lot to you. You spent all of your time carefully studying a contest between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and everything else was reduced to noise. For you. But for the rest of Planet Earth, not supporting Hillary Clinton is not only a bad way to categorize human beings — this is something that describes almost everyone. Buddhist monks in Myanmar, monarchists in Portugal, and pink dolphins in the Amazon River also did not vote for Hillary Clinton, but if you use this negative characteristic as a way to describe them all, instead of appreciating the diverse qualities that are actually present, you are really obsessed with Hillary Clinton. From the perspective of an Iraqi Communist, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump might have “more things in common with each other” than they do with her comrades, but most Iraqi Communists are not self-centered enough to define the entire world in relation to themselves (this tendency is most common among North Atlantic liberals, for reasons we will soon discuss).

Here’s another one: “both the extreme-left and the extreme-right believe in the use of violence to achieve political ends.” Well, so did the Sumerians, and King David and Catherine the Great, and Mao, and the Suffragettes, and — well, almost everyone, except for radical pacifists. President Joe Biden is commander-in-chief of the largest military in human history, the “most lethal” killing machine ever assembled. What unites Gilgamesh and Che Guevara is that they would use violence differently than Barack Obama; what they have “in common” is that their worldviews are not hegemonic in the West.

Over the last few decades North Atlantic liberals (that is, liberal in the broad sense that includes George W. Bush and Emmanuel Macron) have felt so confident in the victory and universality of this ideological system that everything else started to look like one big, blurry, deviation. Might be time to broaden our horizons.

Ok I’m stretching these spatial metaphors to their limit now but um, you can look up from your feet and uh, use them to climb the mountain of knowledge, if you want to perceive more of the beauty and possibility of the world.